You also might want to try this. It worked for me. I'm one of the people suffering massive FPS loss since Hotfix 4. I know this is an old fix for the GameBryo Engine but Rift does work on the same engine

Your bloke is insane. Rift is only coded for DX9. Adding a forced DX9 command will accomplish nothing. Tuning settings down/off is going to be your only way to improve performance. (Though if you are at 1 or 2 gig and can increase that you may get a touch better performance that way. Laptop ram can be horribly expensive though depending on the type and size.)

The single largest contributor to fps I have seen comes from the resolution you use. Dropping resolution by one level was enough to add multipass terrain, full screen effects, and maxed ground clutter onto my settings (which already include maxed view distances and texture quality, and middleish lighting/AA/Shaders/et al) with a net of no fps change.

Rifts shadows engine and my card don't get along, for some reason, sadly.

"You're right. Technically he has the right to cry about it. And I have the right to mock him for crying about something stupid." ~Bridgeburner
"Try to hate other people less, you might enjoy life more." ~Tenet

Despite being a new game 2011, the technology is ooooooooooold, it runs dx9 standard, not dx10 or 11 sadly

The technology is actually quite new; Rift utilizes deferred rendering techniques as well as shader-based edge-blurring antialiasing. Additionally, DX9 is still the bulk of what even a top-end DX11 engine can deliver; DX10 was a smaller feature release that never got used very much, while DX11 was mostly a speed-up of DX10 plus tesselation support (which has yet to be used in an impactful way in more than a couple of titles, and features of which are being used mainly for speed-up of rendering rather than visuals). Rift is actually pretty much cutting-edge in the MMORPG space on this front. It's a common misconception on gamers' parts though that a higher DX version (DX9 vs. DX11) magically makes things look better, though, so don't worry about it. The art assets and tech capabilities combined are what make a game look good.